The penetration of Personal Computer space remains low, and with Windows 10 support nearing end, Qualcomm sees an opportunity to grow its PC market in India.
Qualcomm has been heavily leaning on its AI capabilities to gain foothold in the Personal Computer market globally. Qualcomm has demonstrated the capabilities of its ARM-based chips to deliver significant performance and battery life in high end PC market. Now, the largest producer of smartphone processors aims to bring these capabilities and efficiency to the mainstream computer market.
Qualcomm sees end of Windows 10 support to give massive opportunity to fuel its growth into PC market, driving consumers into ARM based AI PCs for the first time. For thing to go its way Qualcomm is heavily betting on price slashes for its Snapdragon X series-based laptops. Prices are down as low as Rs 65,990 in Indian market, hoping for the consumers to choose its product over the devices from Intel and AMD.
The New Qualcomm Snapdragon X
The snapdragon X consists of 8-core Oryon central processor, a graphics component and a dedicated AI chip. The new Qualcomm chip will run Microsoft’s Copilot Plus and will join the lineup of existing chips from the company, the Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite. The Snapdragon X will be made available to variety of devices from major makers including Lenovo, Dell, HP etc. in coming months.
Kedar Kondap, SVP, Compute and Gaming, sees the opportunity for Qualcomm to grow its presence in the PC market in India. Kondap wants to replicate the similar strategy Qualcomm used to build its smartphone market in India and globally. “If you look at where the phone market started, it was in single digits and grew all the way up to 50 percent. We are hoping that, with focus on K-12 education and making AI PC accessible to students, they will be able to do much more. This should lead to significant growth over the next three to five years,” Kondap quoted.
Copilot+ and Compatibility
Though Qualcomm is lowering the price of its AI PCs, it still includes a 45 TOPS NPU which supports the Microsoft’s Copilot Plus features broadening their appeal to the customers. But a fundamental problem still remains- Traditionally windows has been run on x86 processors, and every windows application is compiled and optimized to run on that architecture. Qualcomm chip PCs run on ARM-native version of Windows and relies on a software emulation layer to support legacy applications. An approach similar to what Apple uses for its ARM-powered Macs.
With Analysts expecting PCs to eventually become an important business for Qualcomm, but it highly depends on how AI PCs evolves along with how Windows on ARM matures. With Qualcomm becoming and new entrant, and Intel and AMD already accelerating their efforts to offer their AI PCs at various price points. Apple remains a challenge to Qualcomm in the AI PC race. Qualcomm’s entry level PCs are directly competing with Apple’s MacBook Air, which is often available in similar price point with discounts and a generation or two older processors.
